


The Shadows That Define Our Every Sunny Day

by osmia_avosetta



Series: There'll Be No More Darkness [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Canon Divergence - The Reichenbach Fall, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Some Parts Set In Victorian Era, Translation: Lazarus Doesn't Happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-24 07:15:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8362723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osmia_avosetta/pseuds/osmia_avosetta
Summary: Sherlock Holmes sees things that other people normally do not. But he's definitely sure that he neither believes in nor sees ghosts...until he meets Molly Hooper, that is. Written for the Halloween at 221B - A Sherlolly Celebration collection.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a stab at creating a thing specifically for a collection, and my first venture into Sherlolly here on AO3. I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

The first time Sherlock saw it, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d accidentally swallowed something he shouldn’t have, because as far as his knowledge went:

  1. The sounds of rustling fabric and glimpses of a person’s shadow _should_ and _must_ be linked to a tangible human form. _This was most certainly not happening, and yet_
  2. Ghosts most certainly did not exist.



Mike Stamford had already begun giving Sherlock limited access to the path lab he’d wanted. Apparently, nobody really wanted to use it anymore after an unfortunate incident from years back.

“A ghost in the controls, of sorts,” Stamford had chortled as he showed Sherlock around. “Half the trainees are convinced that this place is haunted.”

“I’m not for the supernatural,” Sherlock had sniffed haughtily in response, shaking a dark curl out of his eyes and surveying the room. “I’ll take it.”

And so, he’d practically moved in, experimenting from early morning until night, when he went back to his flat alone.

The presence was only starting to make itself known, as if it had been too shy to show itself before. Sherlock didn’t want to admit it, but the presence in the lab felt at least some part human. He could feel _someone_ watching him day after day, even when he was sure that he was completely alone in the room.

It was a slightly chilly, early autumnal morning in London. Sherlock had taken to wearing a deep charcoal coat with the collar popped and his nice new blue scarf wrapped around his throat and hanging down his chest. This ensemble was now hanging on a hook by the door, and Sherlock’s sleeves were rolled up as he leaned in close to his microscope, delicately stretching out his fingers to adjust the slide.

And suddenly, a whisper of air came from his right, and something poked him sharply in the arm.

Sherlock was usually not easily frightened, but this time he jumped away from the table, jerking his slide off the stage (he inwardly cursed for forgetting to secure it) and gave a yell of terror.

“Bloody _hell!_ ” he roared, heart thudding impossibly fast as he reeled backwards, clutching the counter behind him in a panic. The thin glass slide skidded off the table and fell to the floor, shattering with a tiny crash.

The door opened abruptly, and Stamford poked his head in.

“Good God, Sherlock! Everything alright in here?” he swept his head around questioningly.

“Yes,” Sherlock fibbed, heart still racing. “I just dropped a sample, is all.”

“Ah, bad luck,” Stamford said sympathetically. “If you need anything, just give a shout. Well,” he amended quickly, “not exactly, but I’m here to help.”

And with that, Stamford shut the door and went on his merry way.

Sherlock instantly strode to the door and locked it soundly, hands still shaking as he did so. He took a few cleansing breaths in and out. Never had he experienced this sort of jarring shock. He’d taken years, _years,_ to polish his persona of the calm, collected genius, but this...this was a first.

 _Ghosts aren’t real, Sherlock,_ he reminded himself before his mind could wander down the path of utter idiocy and assumption.

But a voice softly spoke in the inner recesses of his Mind Palace, gentle yet firm.

_When you have eliminated the impossible…_

Sherlock turned back around to face the seemingly empty room. Nothing seemed too out of place, except for the slide broken on the floor. Pity, he’d been waiting for ages to examine that one. At least it wasn’t anything hazardous, or he’d be thrown out unceremoniously. He could imagine the hell he’d receive from Mycroft.

He heaved a breath.

_Whatever remains, however improbable…_

He let his breath out.

_Must be the truth._

And did something that was absolutely mad, _insane_ even, in his books.

“Right,” he announced to the empty room, his voice reverberating across the lab like ripples racing across water. “This goes against practically everything I have or ever will believe in, but screw it. What…” He took another breath to keep his tone from ricocheting up a few octaves. “What on Earth are you?!”

A beat.

Silence.

And then in Sherlock Holmes’s day of insane firsts, he added another one to his list.

 _For a man of reputable science, you are surprisingly shouty,_ a decidedly female voice whispered. The voice was echoing through the room, and yet it sounded like it was all in Sherlock’s mind. It was like a lion’s roar, and yet it was as gentle and sweet as a cold breeze coming off the water to hit him square in the face, to overtake his senses and transport him to places he’d never imagined.

“B-but...that’s impossible,” he said wildly, then remembered his motto…

_When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth._

This _voice,_ this being that should never have existed, was astonishingly a _truth._

“I’m the only person in this room,” Sherlock fought against himself. “How are you talking to me? I can’t even _see_ you!”

Almost as soon as the last word exited his mouth, a strong gust of air blasted through the laboratory, frisking wildly through his already-wild curls, and Sherlock instinctively threw his arms up to shield his face, bracing himself against the door as if it were all that was holding him up.

Just as it arrived, the wind died down, and Sherlock found the courage to lower his arms.

And he _stared._

There in front of him was a small, thin figure, transparent yet still visible. As Sherlock watched in a mixture of shock and curiosity, the figure grew steadily less opaque until he could actually make out an intricate updo and small hands crossed over a long dress that hung to the floor and stopped a few centimeters above the tile. It definitely accounted for all the rustling he’d been hearing since he’d started using this particular lab.

“ _I’m not for the supernatural,_ ” the woman mimicked in her gentle voice. “A tad close-minded for a man of science, eh?”

Sherlock was barely listening, his mind categorizing all of the details before him and formulating a definite conclusion: this _thing,_ whatever she was, came from -

“The Victorian Era,” his tongue managed to work out. “Y-you’re from the Victorian Era.”

“Actually,” the woman contradicted boldly, a little bit of... _do ghosts...blush?_ appearing high on what appeared to be her cheekbones. “I lived and died during the Victorian Era, sir. I did not simply pop out of of the time of the reign of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria and end up here, in the reign of...oh dear, what is their name, again? I seem to have lost track. After all,” she said a bit dryly, “a century can do that to you.”

“Still a Queen,” Sherlock responded numbly, not believing that this conversation was happening. Had it been the risotto, or the carbonara that had inevitably poisoned him? He made a note to ask Angelo to be careful of what he added into the dishes. But his mind insisted, _Whenever you eliminate the impossible…_

Sherlock shook the thought out of his head and continued. “Elizabeth the Second.”

“Quite. Thank you kindly, sir.” She pondered for a second. “I can feel it,” she said quietly. “You have a lot of questions, and you want answers. You are active in the sciences. It is only natural that you inquire. But I can attempt to answer some of your questions now.” The slightly-opaque woman (Sherlock still had trouble calling her a _ghost_ ) made a little bob of a curtsy towards him and gave him a little smile, still hovering quite noticeably above the tile floor. “I am Marie Eleanor Hooper. When I lived, in the Victorian Era as you so correctly inferred, I worked here at this hospital. Most called me Molly, though, or Hooper while at work. I have been tied to this hospital ever since my death and cannot venture beyond the doors to see the London of today. And…” she trailed off a bit sadly. “You are the first person I have spoken to since directly before my death.”

With this morbid detail hanging in the air, Sherlock stared at Molly with what he knew was a distinct expression of disbelief plastered on his face. Molly’s sad little smile slipped right off her face, and a troubled expression clouded her faint features.

Sherlock still couldn’t move.

“And if you do not believe in me…” Molly forced the words out, extreme sorrow clouding her tone as Sherlock saw her growing fainter and fainter by the second, “which I most certainly suspect...I will be happy to disappear and leave you in peace, and you can forget everything you have just heard and simply believe that it was a hallucination induced by food poisoning. Good day, sir, and I am sorry to have bothered you.”

And with that, Molly disappeared in a dull _pop_ that almost sounded… _disappointed,_ if noises could give off that sort of emotion.

Sherlock shook his head thoroughly until he’d gotten himself disoriented and the lab tilted and moved about him.

He turned and unlocked the door before striding over to the supply closet and taking out cleaning supplies to take care of the mess the broken slide had left on the floor.

Finding the lab much too quiet for his liking, Sherlock grabbed his mobile from next to his microscope with long fingers and unlocked it with a click. Thumbing through his music, he selected a playlist he’d filled with Vivaldi and Paganini. Tossing it onto the counter to play, he rummaged about for a beaker and placed his phone inside, speaker-side down, to amplify the music as he worked.

He cleaned up the broken slide, disposed of it carefully, and made sure the floor was clean enough before he stepped back and heaved a breath, trying to forget the events of earlier as the strains of violin echoed through the little lab.

But a little chill still seeped into his bones, and Sherlock felt himself involuntarily shiver.

He eyed the clock. _11:55._

Deciding to take an early lunch, he switched off the music and stowed the beaker away before pocketing his phone and looping his scarf around his neck.

He shrugged on his coat and reached for the door handle.

Sherlock was about to leave as quickly as he could, but something held him back as he held a hand over the light switches.

He looked back at the room, at the spot where Molly had appeared. One of his eyebrows quirked as he thought, a twinge of regret clawing at his chest.

Finally, he came to a decision.

He rifled through his pockets until he caught hold of his little leather notebook and pen. Shoving the pen into his mouth, he carefully tore out a page, pocketed the notebook, braced the little piece of paper against the wood of the door, and yanked the pen out of his mouth, letting the tip of the nib hover just so over the paper.

The words came to him easily.

He scribbled a message before tossing the paper onto the table, switching off the lights, shoving the pen into his pockets, and taking a hasty leave, locking the door behind him and pocketing the key.

In the darkened lab, the paper rustled slightly, as if caught in a miniature breeze.

As if the breath of a reader had stirred it.

_Apologies. Feel free to take up residence in here, but do not get in my way. SH_

_P.S. The name is Sherlock Holmes._

* * *

 

It was well into the next morning before Sherlock had the courage to go back to his lab. He’d put in a word with Angelo about taking care about what happened to the food he served, but even that request was mostly half-hearted. Sherlock actually had to admit then that he was a bit curious about Molly-the-ghost, and decided to make an attempt at finding more about the positively tiny woman. With that, he’d proceeded to seek out the hospital archives and scribbled down a list of what little he knew, or could deduce, about Molly.

He’d headed the paper with her name first, in his hurried scrawl: _Marie Eleanor Hooper (Molly)._ Then, he added little bullet points underneath the name: _Victorian Era (possibly close to turn of century), Possible Suffragette, Nurse?_ He’d deduced that Molly had lived and died around the late 1800’s, possibly 1880’s to 1890’s. Her dress looked a bit shabby for the 1890’s, although, he admitted, that could be due to financial constraint. He inferred that she was a suffragette due to his knowledge of the political and social upheavals and conflicts of the time, and that she seemed...how to say it... _proud_ of working at Bart’s. However, he guessed that she was only a nurse, since that could possibly have been the only position open to women at the time.

Knowing all of this, he sat back and eyed his paper critically. Even with the deductions he’d made, it still wasn’t a lot of information to go off of. He couldn’t guess an age by height: outliers definitely existed, and this Molly, short as she was, was absolutely one of them. She’d been too transparent for him to get a better look, and he’d been standing on the other side of the room, too afraid to approach. Suddenly, an epiphany occurred to him: records. He immediately tried to seek out records of employment from the 1800’s, providing the excuse of research to the skeptical historian he encountered. She’d eventually let him pore over the record books, and he’d snapped on some gloves before turning each delicate page, a bit of excitement growing in his chest as he searched the nurses’ records for a _Marie Eleanor Hooper_ . He forced himself not to flick through the old, worn pages in a rush to get to the _H_ section, but as he began to see a _Halsey_ and a _Harris_ , he began to grow even more excited. He’d always liked that, the little rush of excitement he got with each intellectual pursuit he made.

Finally, he got to _Hodges_ , and he made himself sit back and take a deep breath in anticipation before rushing on deeper through the alphabet. _Hogan, Holland, Holloway, Homer, Hopkinson._

 _Wait._ He looked for a double- _o_ name. _Hooper? Hooper?_

But there was no Hooper. He persuaded the historian to let him look at more record books, but still, nobody by the name of Hooper had taken up nursing at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital from 1880 - 1890.

Molly couldn’t have come from earlier, Sherlock reasoned. Perhaps he should stretch his search zone farther.

So he broadened his search query to all forms of employment at Bart’s from 1880 to 1890, looking desperately for a Hooper. Unfortunately, this also proved useless except for a Milo Alexander Hooper employed in pathology. _There was no way Molly would be a_ pathologist _,_ Sherlock struck the idea down and closed the book at last, unsatisfied look growing on his face as he snapped off his gloves and tossed them on the table before throwing the historian a couple of notes for her trouble, nodding respectfully, and whisking out the door. By then, night had fallen, and Sherlock had to make his way back to his flat before Mycroft tried to test if he was clean.

So he hadn’t been able to return to his lab since the day before.

As he strode purposefully down the hallway, ideas of experiments flitting in his head and an exciting prospect of a case from his newfound friend Greg Lestrade when he was scheduled to stop by Scotland Yard later that day, his shoes clicked on the tile loudly. Almost as if they were announcing, “Time for another day!”

As he neared his lab door, he began to whistle a bit of one of Chopin’s Mazurkas for piano (he was a violinist, but years of hearing a child Mycroft practice on the family piano had inadvertently ingrained some of the music in his Mind Palace.)

He stopped after a few measures as the door soundlessly opened of its own volition. In fact, everything about Sherlock stopped. He stood, still as a statue, in the hallway, staring at the door, before he recovered himself and gingerly walked in.

He couldn’t help but shiver as the door closed behind him without him even touching it.

The lights, strangely, were already on as he shrugged off his coat and scarf and hung them on the pegs. As he strode towards the cabinets where the microscopes were, a rustle of fabric made him whirl around, spooked.

His scarf had fallen to the tile floor. He muttered a curse. Probably he hadn’t hung it up correctly. But as he moved forward to fix it back on the hook, it slowly rose up from the floor with even more rustlings of fabric and hung itself neatly next to the coat.

Sherlock’s gaze fell on the main table of the lab, its smooth surface gleaming in the fluorescent lights. His mouth dropped open in surprise and he found himself stepping towards it, a bit of trepidation filling his chest.

The paper he’d thrown onto the table was still there, but it was folded neatly, crisply, as if someone had run a fingernail across the crease. Sherlock pulled out a drawer and drew out a pair of gloves, wincing a bit as the rubber snapped against his skin. Carefully, he picked up the paper and unfolded it with a surgeon’s precision.

His eyes widened.

Absolutely tiny words were pressed into the paper, as if carved into the stationery with...a very fine _hairpin?_ Sherlock mentally pushed all of his other projects to the side and focused entirely on the little mystery he’d encountered. He delicately held the paper up to the light to inspect it further. The words he’d scribbled were still there, but below the written words were the pressed ones. He squinted in order to read it better.

_Was not considering leaving this lab. Despite your rudeness you seem somewhat of an unorthodox gentleman. I would dearly like to see an experiment of yours. MH_

“Well,” Sherlock exhaled interestedly. There was one more thing he wanted to test.

He rummaged around the drawer behind him for some solid iodine. “Right, Molly,” he announced to the empty room, wondering if the ghost was really listening to him. “Just going to do a simple iodine fuming on your little note. See if there are any fingerprints other than my own on here. Feel free to watch.” He watched in intrigue as a barely-there outline appeared near the edge of the table, to his right.

Molly had listened.

And she was there.

Filled with more intrigue, he grabbed a container with one gloved hand and the solid iodine with the other. Slipping the paper into the container with the hand not holding the iodine, he watched Molly’s form consolidate into the semi-transparent figure that he’d seen yesterday.

He smirked, slid the iodine into the container, and sealed the container shut.

Snapping off his gloves, he did something...how had Molly written it? _Unorthodox._

Disposing his gloves according to procedure, he lifted the container to Molly’s ghostly eye level.

“I’m using iodine fuming to see if I can lift any fingerprints other than mine on this paper. It’s a good way to develop latent prints on porous and non-porous surfaces. Like paper,” he explained, letting Sherlock-the-chemist take the wheel.

“So how does this work? Well, as you’ve just seen, I’ve sealed the solid iodine in with the paper, and the sublimation of the iodine…”

He never found any fingerprints other than his own.

* * *

 

As September rolled by, Sherlock found himself growing more vocal in the lab. He started to actually talk to Molly as he did his experiments, not caring that she didn’t make any replies. Sherlock knew all too well that he looked like a madman talking to himself, but every so often he’d glance up and see a semi-transparent woman sitting on a stool at the table across from his work area, hands folded neatly, the dark surface of the lab table showing through her hands. Often he would refer to her by name, and she’d visibly perk up. For some odd reason Sherlock rather liked it when she did so, as if he was engaging an intelligent pupil who was truly interested in what he was doing and how he was doing it. After a close call with Stamford one day in early October, he took to locking the doors when he did his little experiments with Molly. It certainly made the days go by quickly, and by mid-October, he didn’t notice that it was lunchtime until Molly would tap a beaker on the table and draw his attention to the clock.

“Lonely? I’m not lonely,” he found himself scoffing to Mycroft during a routine abduction in mid-October.

And with that, he realised that he’d actually come to trust the little transparent woman who opened the door silently every time he approached his lab and watched him silently as he performed his various experiments. He solved crimes brought to him by Lestrade as Molly watched. And often, with a little tap of a glass beaker as a signal, Molly would make observations of her own and draw attention to areas of interest in the evidence he brought to puzzle over with her.

He’d come to regard her as a companion, never mind the fact that she was _dead_ and he was not.

It was rather late in October before Sherlock actually had the courage to bring up something with her.

“Say, Molly,” he found himself muttering as he dripped some IKI into his test tube one day. “Why don’t you ever actually _say_ things?”

“Well, Holmes,” a soft voice said. “You never asked.”

Sherlock’s hand shuddered and he ended up dripping the iodine all over the table, startled by the sudden sound after the few minutes of relative silence in the lab. Hastily grabbing a few towels to wipe up the mess, he jerked his head up and stared at Molly-the-ghost, who had grown a tad less transparent and was smirking slightly.

“Cheeky, aren’t you?” he said, to which Molly actually... _did ghosts blush?_

“It is one of my worst flaws, as my mother always told me,” Molly apologized, a hint of gray appearing high on what passed as cheekbones on a ghost.

“No,” Sherlock said, to his own surprise. “No, I don’t mind it.”

Disposing of the paper towels carefully, he straightened up, washed his hands, and took a deep breath, taking the bottle of IKI out of his drawer.

“Right,” he continued. “Now that all the members of this party are speaking, shall we start over again?”

“Certainly, Holmes,” Molly replied.

A few months later, Sherlock met John, which definitely kept him out of the lab for much longer than he’d anticipated. Of course, one of the first things Sherlock did with his new flatmate was to test John if he could actually see Molly. To Sherlock’s relative disappointment, John couldn’t see Molly, having stared through her several times and then complained about being hauled to the lab for what seemed like absolutely no reason. And as John herded Sherlock out during the first and only time Sherlock tried to show him the ghost in his lab, a pleasant day in April, the self-labelled consulting detective twisted around to see Molly’s shimmering figure, her hands folded neatly over her dress as usual, a sad little smile on her features as the door shut with a strange sort of finality.

“Er, Holmes?” Molly called out seven months later as he whirled about the lab, collecting test tubes and beakers that were long due for a wash. He’d taken the opportunity to visit the lab again, John having returned to active practice at a clinic. Molly was sitting on top of the table, her ghostly skirts spread out around her gracefully, head whirling about to follow Sherlock’s movements. Sherlock had asked her to move there so that he wouldn’t accidentally pass through her in his mad dash around the lab in search of clean lab equipment. “Holmes!”

He stopped then, and turned to face her. Her face was a bit expectant, halfway cautious, a bit eager. It had grown less transparent over time, and bit by bit, Sherlock was beginning to see more of her facial features. Now, he could see the outline of a determined chin, thin but not severe lips, a delicate nose, and average eyebrows over wide eyes.

“Thank you,” she said dryly. “Holmes, I just had a question.”

“Firstly, don’t call me Holmes, it wastes time. I’m not a primary school student. For the millionth time, I’m Sherlock,” Sherlock said, bending over to open a cabinet.

“ _Holmes,_ ” Molly sighed in slight irritation. “For God’s sake, man, let me finish. I had a _question._ ”

“Fine, what is it?”

“I am _getting there,_ ” Molly sighed again. “Has nobody taught you the virtue of patience? Anyway,” she rushed on, probably thinking he would clip out a reply. “I was wondering what date it is.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said, closing the cabinet with a bang and striding purposefully to his mobile. He knew Molly’s eyes were watching him with closely guarded intrigue, as she always did whenever he worked with it. “The 31st of October, 2010,” he read off the screen before he switched it back off and pocketed his mobile. “Why do you ask?” he inquired as he looked back at the ghost sitting primly on his table.

“Oh,” she said faintly, as if she hadn’t heard the tail end of his sentence. “ _Oh._ ”

“What is it?” Sherlock asked.

“Today is the anniversary of when I died,” Molly said faintly, as if not quite believing that it was true. “You really said that it was the 31st of October?”

“Yes,” Sherlock replied, deciding to take a break from searching for clean glassware, hoisting himself on the counter across from her ghostly skirts. “So you died here? In this room?”

She ducked her head, and Sherlock inwardly winced. It wasn't a good question; in fact it was quite awkward. Obviously it was a delicate subject for Molly.

But to Sherlock’s surprise, Molly replied. “Not in this room,” she murmured. “Not exactly inside the hospital, anyway. I died just outside the front door.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said awkwardly. What would he say next? _Sorry_ sounded too aloof. _I'm sorry for your loss_ was a bit inappropriate, since she was the one who died.

“How did you die?” made it out of his mouth.

_Not good. Not good, not good, not good._

Molly’s eyes widened in shock, and Sherlock didn’t so much as inwardly wince as inwardly groan at himself. _Bit not good, Sherlock,_ his inner Mind Palace John reprimanded him in the most reproachful tone imaginable, John’s dark blue eyes glittering with repressed frustration at the idiotic antics of his socially awkward flatmate. Sherlock imagined a huge cuff across the ear to go with it.

“Er…” Molly’s voice trailed off awkwardly, and she averted her gaze, blinking rapidly. “That, Holmes, is actually...is actually...is a story for another day,” she stuttered wildly. Finally, she looked back into Sherlock’s face, her eyes blown wide and almost scared.

“I...I have to go,” she murmured before disappearing into thin air.

Sherlock threw his head into his hands and groaned in dismay.

_Not good. Not good, not good, not good._

* * *

 

After Sherlock's mishap with Molly, it was like taking three steps back after going forward so far. She returned to not speaking to him for long periods on end, only speaking when she really needed to. Sherlock didn't get to the lab for long periods either, his practice as a consulting detective growing by the day. He received more emails and cases from clients and Lestrade begging for his assistance in what felt like the impossible. Often, Sherlock would try to invite Molly to accompany him on these cases if legwork was needed so she could see the London of the 21st century and to make up for his awkward moment with her. However, she always shook her head and quietly said, “Do not forget, I cannot venture beyond the boundaries of this hospital.”

It ended up taking until Christmas that year for her to regain his trust. On one of the few days he was able to get away to the lab, during the ongoing Irene Adler issue, he realised he still wanted to know more about Molly Hooper. So he took himself to the archives and devoted himself into looking into the life of Milo Alexander Hooper, head of the pathology department in the late 1800’s and potentially a disguised Molly Hooper. Sherlock had done some more research on women in the Victorian Era and realised that it _was_ probable for Molly to have disguised herself as a man and got into pathology. He'd also seen enough of her hands to note that they were chapped at the tips, with immaculately kept nails: both indicators of hard labour with a side of the need for cleanliness. All signs applied to pathology.

So he'd inquired after the records of Milo Alexander Hooper, which took quite a large amount of Sherlock's time and persuasive skills, as the resident historian held a long memory and hadn't quite forgotten the last time Sherlock had appeared in her domain. But eventually, she'd taken him to the files and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves before giving him a pair and silently tracing a finger over the edges of a few files before getting to the one she wanted.

“It's not often people request files of medical personnel from this time,” she explained. “But when they do, it's this one they take out. We haven't gotten a request for this file since my predecessor in 1976.”

She promptly pulled out the file and handed it to him, lips pursed.

He'd taken it to a study table and eagerly opened the file, which was full of aging paperwork. _Hold on a tick,_ he thought. “Are any of these digitised?” he inquired of the historian, who thought for a bit and beckoned him to a computer.

“I'll see what I can do,” she said and put on her reading glasses before logging on.

Five minutes later, Sherlock had been seated in front of the computer, scrolling through the file of Milo Alexander Hooper.

He saw that Milo was born on the 17th of June, 1864 to Marcia Cecily Branwell Hooper and Gabriel Milo Hooper. Gabriel was a relatively unknown diplomat to the Far East, and Marcia was from a family of merchants and businesspeople. Milo had no living siblings.

Sherlock scrolled down further. Milo had trained as a pathologist in St. Bart’s beginning 1890, and within 5 years had ascended to become a true pathologist before ascending further to head the Bart’s morgue in early 1897. Incidentally, Milo had begun to head the morgue in the very same year as his death. Sherlock’s eyebrows furrowed.

“This is all quite good and well,” he murmured to himself. “But Milo heading a morgue in the same year he died? And him being in good health from these other records? This could have pointed to…”

“Assassination,” he and the historian said at the same time.

He jerked his head over to the woman, who was standing nearby. “You’ve…?” The question hung off.

“That was the first file my predecessor showed me when I took over these archives,” she replied. “He hadn’t noticed that discrepancy, but when I decided to look again, I realized that Milo was probably assassinated. But I couldn’t find a coroner’s report, or an autopsy, or _anything._ It was frustrating!” The historian ran a hand through her mousy hair, face fixed in an expression of confusion. “I practically checked every possible nook and cranny in this archive, but I found absolutely nothing about Milo’s death. Not a newspaper article, or an obituary, _anything!_ Almost like…” She furrowed her eyebrows. “Now,” she broke off temporarily, “this is just a conjecture of mine. I’m not even sure if it’s true, or if I’m right, but...it’s almost like Bart’s wanted to cover something up.”

Sherlock nodded slowly in agreement.

“Sorry to disturb you,” the historian clipped out before briskly walking away into the shelves, heels clicking on the floor as if their conversation had never happened.

Sherlock had scrolled down farther and farther until he nearly hit the bottom of the page. He sighed and twitched the mouse, letting the page scroll down all the way until the cursor reached the bottom, and…

Sherlock couldn’t help it: he let out a gasp.

An old photograph in black-and-white, probably scanned into the archival system, peered out at him from the computer screen. It wasn’t the best quality, probably deteriorated with age when it had been put into the digital system, but it was a photograph.

And it was the most damning evidence Sherlock had found that when living, the ghost of Molly Eleanor Hooper was known widely as Milo Alexander Hooper.

How so?

Because the woman solemnly gazing into the camera, wide eyes somber and haunting, determined little chin over a delicately curved neck, small shoulders squared back as if eager to prove their owner’s worth was _definitely_ the ghost in his lab.

Sherlock had surreptitiously hacked into the system, copied the photograph, and sent it to his private email, the one only John, Mycroft, and Lestrade knew about. Then he’d sat back, breathing heavily before logging out of the system and walking out to clear his head and hail a cab.

Once back at 221B, he made sure John wasn’t looking and opened up his laptop to print the photograph off the barely-used machine he had stored away. He printed out a small, wallet-size image for himself and cajoled Mrs. Hudson into buying him a frame for it. Sherlock wouldn’t specify what the image exactly was, but he told her the size and other preferences: not too flashy, but not too boring either. He felt that that suited the photograph’s occupant perfectly, and when Mrs. Hudson had brought back a simple tortoiseshell frame without any other decorations, he’d thanked her and fitted the photograph into the frame.

Sherlock had kept the framed photograph in his coat ever since, it being small enough to fit in his tiny inner pocket. Often when he was alone, he would pull out the photograph and look at it for a bit before pocketing it again and heading to his next destination.

Sherlock normally did not give out Christmas presents. But on Christmas Eve that year, he saw John off in his cab (John went to visit his sister in the morning and did not return until Boxing Day) and promptly pivoted on a heel, directing his steps to Bart’s.

A paper-wrapped picture frame was nestled in his coat pocket.

“Good heavens, Sherlock,” Stamford shook his head as Sherlock clipped out a short greeting and tipped him a nod. “It’s Christmas Eve, what the hell are you doing?”

“Experiments to run,” Sherlock tossed over his shoulder as he marched to his usual lab.

This time, he opened the door himself and flipped on the lights. He hadn’t been inside his lab in a long while, and being inside the place filled him with a joyful sort of familiarity, something akin to the feeling of coming home.

He locked the door behind him.

“Molly?” he called out to the room, the name rolling off of his tongue again. He hadn’t said her name in quite a long time. Just saying her name brought back images of a slightly transparent brown head bobbing up and down as she moved throughout the lab, a gentle, inquisitive voice asking a question about a certain chemical compound, a pair of pale hands folded neatly on the table.

“Molly,” he said again, a hint of worry creeping into his chest. “It’s me. Sherlock.”

No response.

The worry grew in his chest.

“Molly, I’ve come back, it’s me,” he tried again. “Can we start over? I haven’t been around often, I know. I’ve...just been busy. There’s a million things I haven’t done and I’m trying to do them all.”

Silence.

“ _Molly,_ ” Sherlock said loudly, not caring that he could probably be heard by anyone going down the hall at the moment. “Where are you?”

“Holmes, Holmes!”

Molly’s figure shimmered and appeared directly in front of Sherlock.

“Holmes, it _is_ you!” she whispered happily, her little hands clapping soundlessly together. “I thought you would never come back. You have not been here since that time with that...that metal thing.”

“You mean the mobile?” Sherlock asked, relief clearing his chest. “The mobile I X-rayed?”

“Yes, that,” Molly acknowledged. “The one that made yours do horrendous noises.”

Sherlock stifled a laugh. He had no idea where the original Adler mobile was, but the one that he had had been an object of interest for him at that time.

“But really, Holmes, what _have_ you been doing?” A hint of closely guarded annoyance crept into Molly’s voice. “I know that I am dead, and I know that I am not the best candidate for one of your companions in your...detective work...but I am your _friend,_ Holmes. I at least deserve to know what happened to you in the space of your long absence from this laboratory.”

“I’ve been _busy,_ ” Sherlock said quickly. “Cases come to me so quickly that I cannot keep up. Sometimes I solve them at my flat, sometimes I have to go around London, around _England,_ to get the job finished. Molly, can’t you understand?” Suddenly, he remembered the package in his coat. As Molly opened her mouth to reply, Sherlock rummaged in his coat pocket and produced the paper-wrapped package. “Oh, and -”

“But _Holmes -_ ”

“Merry Christmas!” he burst out over her retort, holding it out to her.

“Oh?” she raised an eyebrow in confusion and looked to him, not noticing the package being held out to her.

“Merry...Merry Christmas,” Sherlock said, jerking his head towards the package.

Molly stared at the package, then him for a good long second. Her anger of the moment seemed to have abated for the time being. “Holmes?” she asked softly. “But what is this?”

“Christmas present,” Sherlock placed it on the central table and beckoned her over. “For you.”

He saw Molly cautiously drift towards him to watch what he was doing. Sherlock let his long fingers pick at his incredibly-precise folds, finding where each bit of paper fit together with tape and ripping the flimsy wrapping apart to reveal the back of the tortoiseshell frame.

As he disposed of the paper, Molly reached over and turned the frame over gently with a flick of her ghostly finger.

Sherlock watched as Molly’s eyes flicked over the image and she gasped, turning slightly more transparent in surprise.

“H-Holmes,” she stammered, a stray curl flipping over her shoulder as she turned her head to face Sherlock. Her eyes were blown wide in shock. “How…” Her gaze went back to the photograph. “Holmes, this is me! This is my picture! How…” She lapsed into silence again, lost in memories of a past she’d thought lost to time.

“You’d be surprised at how much you can recover today,” Sherlock said. He felt something rush in his chest...something akin to the feeling he got whenever he solved a particularly difficult case. Satisfaction? Was it satisfaction?

 _I’m never satisfied,_ he’d always told himself. So was it something else, then? Pride? No, pride wasn’t the word he was looking for - there was much more inside him, now.

“May I keep it?” Molly’s gentle voice hauled him out of his thoughts.

Sherlock exhaled a short chuckle. “That’s the concept of a Christmas gift. Isn’t it?” He’d been enlightened to this very concept that morning, when John and Mrs. Hudson had given him a slightly early present of some imported honey from Japan.

“My,” Molly whispered appreciatively, picking up the photograph in her ghostly hands. It almost looked like the photograph was hovering as she lifted it to the shelf above the sink and placed it gently next to a microscope. She glided back a bit to stare at it, a little smile curving over her mouth before she looked askance at him and looked back down at the floor before making a decision.

Sherlock was wondering what she was thinking before she gathered herself and rushed at him, throwing her ghostly arms around his neck. The weight he’d normally expect from an impact of this magnitude did not come, but he staggered back anyhow. Her arms weighed nothing, but he felt like a spring breeze had coursed directly through him as Molly glided back a bit guiltily.

“Sorry, Holmes,” she murmured. “My feelings seem to have gotten away with me there.”

“I should think so,” Sherlock said, but it sounded more like a friendly jab than a mean-spirited jibe. “No need to apologise,” he tacked on, feeling like he sounded much warmer than usual. He rubbed his arm. He felt _different,_ in a way. A bit more... _why was he having such a hard time putting thoughts into words?_

Molly smiled a bit shyly.

And Sherlock had no idea what was happening to himself.

* * *

 

That night was much different.

Sherlock had found the box on his mantelpiece as he was holding his solo concert for Mrs. Hudson. As he opened the box and found the mobile... _Irene’s mobile..._ he found his stomach dropping, and a million thoughts raced through his head.

The dominatrix who he’d been talking with only six months before was going to be found dead, otherwise why would her mobile be sent to him, placed on his mantelpiece?

And then one thing led to another, and he was called to Bart’s morgue, and the worker in charge had left him alone in the echoing, empty place, alone with the body of one of the greatest intellects he could ever have matched with, there on the slab with her face smashed in.

It stunk of death.

He leaned on the opposite slab, exhaling into the air, imagining smoke curling into the death-laden room.

Surely the smell of smoke could override the pong of the recently deceased.

He sighed again, not wanting to look at the body on the slab.

“Dear me,” a soft voice commented from behind him, sad and sweet all at the same time. “It is a pity for your girlfriend to have died on Christmas Eve. I am sorry.”

Sherlock turned around.

Molly was sitting on a counter, her skirts spread out prettily around her as usual. She seemed totally unfazed by the sight of a dead, naked woman on a slab a few meters away from her seat.

“Girlfriend?” he asked. “How did you pick that up?”

“I have been here for a century, Holmes,” Molly continued, sliding off the counter and hovering a few inches above the floor before slowly crossing the room to meet him, passing through the slab he was leaning against. “I pick things up.”

Sherlock sniffed the smallest of laughs. “Well, in any case, it would never have worked out,” he said to her, gaze fixed directly in front of him even though he could feel her presence to his right. “She was gay.”

“Gay?” Molly asked in confusion. Sherlock remembered that she’d have no idea what he was talking about, being a respectable woman from the Victorian Era. Well, she _did_ work in a morgue, so probably not the kind of _respectable_ one could imagine for the time period, but still.

“Never mind,” Sherlock dismissed quickly.

They stood in silence, staring at the body for a few minutes longer.

Suddenly, a question Sherlock had said came into his mind again. _How did you die, Molly Hooper?_

“You want to know how _I_ died, do you not?” Molly’s voice sounded quite small.

Sherlock whipped his gaze around to meet Molly’s. “How did you know?” he asked her.

“I can feel it,” she said back in the same small voice. “Like a breeze coming to clap you in the face. I can feel you wondering. And...I think I am ready to show you.”

“What?” The full meaning of her statement didn’t hit Sherlock until a few seconds later. “Really?” he asked, his eyebrows shooting up. “The last time I asked that…”

“The last time you asked that, I was not ready to show you. I was not ready to confront my past that abruptly. I…” Her voice trailed off. “I just could not bear to see it happen all over again.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said numbly, quite at a loss for words.

“But when you gave me my picture, you gave back to me a piece of my past, and I realized something very important, Holmes.”

She didn’t wait for him to reply, just barrelled on.

“I cannot keep running from my past. I am a shadow, and my past will catch up with me in due time. Running will do me no good. When I was alive, I tried to run from my past. I died, and even then I kept running. Holmes…”

Sherlock wanted to be able to touch her, to rub her back like John sometimes did to Mrs. Hudson when she wasn’t feeling well.

But she was _dead,_ he reminded himself, not for the first time.

“I do not want to keep running,” she said quietly. “So I...I will show you how I died.”

She went to go to his front. Through Molly, Sherlock could see Irene’s body laid out on the slab.

Molly closed her eyes, as if gathering herself, before stretching out a hand.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Definitely.”

“Then what do we stall for?”

Sherlock closed his eyes.

Breathed.

Then he reached out and touched her ghostly, ethereal hand.

As the world turned upside down, _click-boom_ \- darkness settled in, as gentle and flowing as the ghost who held his hand.

The morgue spun dizzily around them, and Sherlock was thrown backwards, crumbling underneath the slab he'd previously leaned on minutes before. But the slab wasn't there, the morgue wasn't there, and as Sherlock's eyes shot open wide and he jerked his gaze about, he realised that Molly was gone too.

It felt like he was eternally being thrown backwards in time. Images, memories, spun and flickered at the corners of his vision before disappearing entirely.

 _This must be what rewinding feels like,_ he realised wildly. In his head he imagined a tape, whizzing backwards as he was.

He turned.

In reverse, Sherlock saw images and memories playing out around him, swirling like powder dissolving in water. Molly throwing herself at him, an expression of pure happiness on her ghostly face. The moment he first saw Molly in the lab so long ago.

The memories weren’t confined to Sherlock and Molly’s friendship, though. Stamford showing Sherlock around a lab. A younger Sherlock, eyes bloodshot, sliding a needle into his arm.

He gasped. A very young Sherlock toddled towards Mycroft and fell into his older brother’s arms. Molly, barely visible, threw a glass beaker at a man advancing on a female hospital worker with a knife. The nearly transparent figure of Molly Hooper cowered under a stairwell, shimmering all over as through a window, explosions burst through the air. The window shattered and everything went black again.

Sherlock still remained on the floor, a chill seeping into his bones. “Molly?” he called out uncertainly. His voice came out as a hoarse whisper, as if he’d been screaming for extended periods of time, but he didn’t remember saying anything at all.

He tried to swallow. His mouth was parched, but he tried either way and managed to summon up what could be excused for a voice. “Molly!” he called out again. “Molly, where are you?”

 _Here,_ a gentle voice sounded in his head, sad and beautiful all at the same time. _I am always with you. Prepare yourself, Holmes._

Light blazed to life.

And Sherlock Holmes found himself crumpled on the floor in what was absolutely, definitely, a Victorian Era morgue.

“Finch, you _clot!_ ” a forced-deep voice roared from behind Sherlock.

Sherlock unsteadily staggered to his feet and whirled around.

Molly was standing there, loudly berating a morgue worker, except she wasn’t in the argentine dress he usually saw. Instead, she was dressed in the garb of a relatively well-off Victorian gentleman.

Sherlock was marveling at her when a voice came to life in his head.

 _That is me,_ Molly said through his Mind Palace. Somehow, her voice infiltrated every room, passed through every locked door. It was like she was looking into his inner self, his darkest thoughts, his most painful memories. Redbeard, not being accepted at school, drugs...He shook himself out. _This is 1897,_ Molly continued. _You are truly a man out of your time._

It looked like the day was almost over: people were cleaning up and leaving little by little. Each person bid a farewell to 1897-Molly as they left until she was left alone, standing in the middle of the morgue. She sighed quietly, a pretty smile crossing her face before she mopped her brow and paced around silently, checking to see if all was well in the empty lab.

Eventually, she found the cleaning job to her satisfaction and picked up a large carpetbag before entering another room through an adjacent door.

 _Do not follow,_ Molly cautioned as the door swung shut. _You have probably already noticed that we are situated underground. Go look to the corner by the window to the ground level._

Sherlock silently crossed the room to the corner indicated, and found that Molly had not been alone in the morgue after all. Two men stood there, quietly conferring.

One of them took out a crudely assembled rifle.

The last piece of the Molly puzzle fell into place.

 _They are to be my assassins,_ Molly confirmed bluntly in his head.

Sherlock’s chest constricted. So this was how Molly had gone to her end: unknowingly, at the hands of jealous men who thought she did not deserve her position. _A martyr for the cause of equality,_ he thought.

 _I am exiting the room in a few seconds,_ Molly warned. _Follow me._

Sure enough, the door Molly had disappeared through swung open, and Molly came out dressed in the argentine, flowing dress that he’d always seen her wearing.

Sherlock’s stomach fell. She’d _died_ in that dress, the dress whose skirts she spread out neatly over the table when she sat, hovering a few centimeters over the surface. The dress that actually rustled whenever she moved. The dress that glimmered with the rest of her figure in the modern, fluorescent lights of the lab.

Sherlock felt quite sick, but he followed Molly anyway.

As they exited the morgue area and began walking through the main hospital, Sherlock noticed that nurses and doctors alike, male and female, would often come up to her, to clasp her hands and exchange heartfelt greetings and compliments. Evidently she was quite popular among the workers. Perhaps through her, they sensed a change in the way women were treated. Perhaps through her, the small female nurse who shyly came up to clasp Molly’s hand would have hope for an equal stance in the medical field with male practitioners.

Eventually, they burst into the weak, mid-autumn sunlight. Carriages rattled back and forth across the street, women with parasols wandered about on the arms of well-to-do gentlemen, and Sherlock felt extremely disoriented. He watched as Molly looked back and forth down the street, her delicate nose wrinkling in the smell, and she raised a gloved hand to call a cab.

 _Look behind you,_ Molly said.

Sherlock did as she was told.

 _Down there, that window, do you see?_ Sherlock located the window she was speaking of. _That’s the morgue window,_ Molly said with absolute bluntness. _Watch carefully._

The tip of a rifle nosed through the half-open windowpanes and fixed itself silently on Molly. The general populace milling about on the opposite end of the street took no notice. Probably because it had been done so stealthily that nobody paid close mind to it.

Sherlock’s stomach fell again as he whipped his gaze towards Molly. “No,” he whispered, even though he _knew_ that 1897-Molly could neither see nor hear him. “Not like this.”

She had no idea of the danger just behind her as a carriage pulled up and she opened the door quickly, chirping a greeting to the driver as she hastily heaved her carpetbag into the carriage -

_BANG!_

Sherlock sprang back and shouted as a single gunshot went off.

The bullet buried itself into Molly’s back, and she collapsed forward onto the floor of the carriage with a scream of pain.

A searing-hot sort of pain shot through Sherlock's abdomen as if he'd been the one who had been shot.

He fell to his knees, frozen on the pavement. Powerless. He was powerless.

The driver jumped out, saw Molly crumpled on the floor of his cab, and sprinted into Bart's as Molly struggled to lift herself.

She coughed. A spray of blood covered the floor of the carriage.

_A martyr for the cause of equality._

Medical personnel came racing out of the hospital, their shouts causing what little passersby lingering after the gunshot to flee the scene. The rifle in the window had disappeared, and Sherlock realised with an angry sort of horror in his chest that the assassins had probably fled as well.

Several doctors went directly to Molly, gently lifting her off the floor of the carriage.

And the worst mistake that could have happened, did.

The doctors, not realising the harm they were causing, turned Molly over and lay her on her _back_ on the pavement.

Her feet were placed next to where Sherlock crouched, frozen on his knees. As soon as Molly was laid out carefully on the pavement, Sherlock saw her eyes widen in shock and horror, realising just how much trouble in which she’d inadvertently been placed.

She began to thrash around, and some doctors decided to hold her down to the pavement. Sherlock was normally not an easily nauseated sort of person, but this time he buried his head in his hands and suppressed the urge to vomit over the pavement. But for all the attempt he made to shut everything out, he could still hear the shouts of medical personnel for assistance, could hear Molly’s gasps of pain as she tried to tell them to turn her over, the rattle in her throat as she began to choke -

Silence.

_No._

Sherlock cracked open an eye.

Molly’s foot, enclosed in a nicely polished black boot, twitched once.

Then it stopped, and fell to the side limply.

 _We should go, Holmes,_ Molly said quietly in his head.

The Victorian London Sherlock and Molly were crumpled in disappeared, and Sherlock was hurtled forwards through time. Weeks, months, years, decades, a whole _century_ peeled away from Sherlock as he hurled forwards.

He probably vomited. Twice.

Suddenly, he found himself crumpled on the floor on not the floor of the morgue, but on the familiar tiles of Sherlock’s own lab at Bart’s. His mouth tasted like vomit.

Molly shimmered into existence a few meters away, and didn’t speak for a few seconds.

“God.” Sherlock spat, the horror slowly beginning to dwindle in his chest. “God, _Molly._ ”

“That is how it happened, Holmes,” Molly replied quietly, a bit weakly. “That is what happened.”

“I...I never realised.” Sherlock staggered to his feet and got out a beaker from one of the cabinets. He held it under the sink’s faucet and filled the beaker with water.

“Holmes, are you quite sure that that water is safe to drink?” Molly said curiously from behind him.

“I don’t care,” Sherlock replied and drank deeply until the taste of vomit had mostly left his throat. He set the beaker down. “I’m...frankly, I’m angry,” he confessed, his gaze fixed on the shelf at eye level.

“A martyr for the cause of equality,” Molly said bluntly. “That is what I was.”

“If they hadn’t put you on your back, there might have been hope,” Sherlock said angrily, whipping to face Molly.

“Sorry, what?” Molly asked in confusion.

“Forgive me for being pedantic,” Sherlock said shamelessly, “but the doctors who treated you on the pavement made some extremely grave errors. For one, the bullet went into your back. Turn around.”

Molly silently did as she was told, a bit of confusion on her transparent face.

“See, I was right,” Sherlock seethed, seeing the dark wound in her back. “Turn back around.” She did so. Sherlock hissed in anger. “And there’s no exit wound. So the bullet was in your body the whole time, Molly. It was a cork. A cork in a bottle. And then the doctors laid you on your back, didn’t they? That pushed the bullet in more. Into your lungs, and then you began to choke on your own blood, and then…”

He pounded a clenched fist on the table, finding himself unable to speak.

“Holmes, why are you so...angry about this?” Molly came up beside him. A ghostly hand came up to his upper back, almost the same spot in which she’d been shot, on that sunlit street in 1897. “Why are you so obsessed with that idea...that idea that if the doctors had known better…”

“Then you could live?” Sherlock looked at Molly directly. “For the simple reason that you could have had a life. A family, an illustrious career. You could have been _everything_ to some person who was just as inspired, as allured by the idea of _you_ as I…” He trailed off, realising that he had been about to say the word _am._

Molly caught the intended meaning despite his halt in speech. Her eyes widened.

“Holmes. You’re not saying…?”

He took a deep breath in and out, tried to calm his racing heartbeat. _That was exactly what I was saying, Molly,_ he thought quietly, not daring to speak the words out loud in the empty lab.

_Exactly what I wanted to say._

* * *

 

_There are many things one can do within the simple act of falling..._

Sherlock had never given this statement much mind before.

Well, at least before he launched himself off the roof of St. Bart's Hospital without a real plan.

_As you fall, there is time to think._

As he fell, thoughts raced through his head, one of the loudest being _How did I get to this point in my life?!_

He had to blame it on Moriarty eventually. That greasy little psychopath had announced that Sherlock's only three friends would be killed by gunmen unless Sherlock launched himself off the building and fell to his death.

That part corresponded with plan number 8 of the various plans Sherlock and Mycroft had dreamed up.

But the part that followed didn't correspond with Plan 8. In fact, it didn't correspond with any of their plans at all.

Of course, neither Holmes brother had expected James Moriarty to blow his brains out on the Hospital rooftop.

So Sherlock was falling. Down, down, down.

 _Time is slow when you're falling to your death,_ Sherlock reasoned peaceably.  

He passed by his old lab window and wondered if Molly was there. Watching him fall to his death as he'd watched her death on a similar street in 1897.

 _Can't wait to see you again,_ he thought dryly. _It's only a matter of time._

He saw John standing frozen, stock still, staring at Sherlock falling to his death. Surely it would be a bit inappropriate to wave. He restrained himself.

 _I'm sorry, John,_ his mind called out to his friend and flatmate. _I have to do this because you know what, John? I care, perhaps too much. Or not at all? No, I do this because I care._

He disappeared out of view behind the ambulance station.

 _Twenty feet, fifteen feet, ten feet_ (Sherlock closed his eyes) _five feet…_

The impact Sherlock was expecting never came.

_“William! Get down from there!”_

_A young Sherlock pays no mind as he steps onto a particularly unstable branch on the tree in the yard._

_And falls down, down, down…_

_A yell is torn from his throats as he feels the branches slip out of his grip._

_He feels the earth come to meet him, imagines a pair of earthen jaws opening wide to devour his body when he hits the ground._

_And suddenly, he's in Mycroft’s arms._

_“Caught you, William,” he hears him say, a rumble in Mycroft’s chest._

Sherlock was lowered to the pavement as gently as if it were his mother lowering him down into his crib.

Time slowed down.

A rustle of fabric at his side.

He opened his eyes in shock. Why wasn't he dead?

“Caught you, Holmes,” a cheery voice said proudly from just above him.

Then a face appeared over him, clearer and more definite than he'd ever seen it.

“Molly,” he breathed out. “Molly, you…”

“I _caught_ you,” the ghost smiled beautifully, her face practically sparkling with incredulous joy. Sherlock was no religious, but he had to admit she looked like an _angel_ , glimmering and almost lit from within. “Holmes, I did not even know I had that in me,” she said cheerily. One of her surprisingly clear hands came up to cradle his head gently. It felt like a warm breeze was crossing his body.

“You _saved_ me,” he managed to choke out. “God, Molly, _how?_ ”

“Overstepping the boundary between living and dead is not easy, Holmes,” Molly whispered, the edges of her eyes crinkling. Only then did he realise that they were the most richly brown eyes he'd ever seen. He gasped quietly. “But I believe I should owe it to you. Yes, you,” she laughed gently at his incredulous expression. “You were the first person to make me feel like I counted in such a long time. I felt more alive in the few years that I could call you my friend than ever. You gave me the strength to stay with you, to adhere to a place that has changed so much since I last walked it. And of course,” she said. “You gave me the strength to do more than that. As you saw.”

A rather becoming blush stole across her face.

Suddenly, as if clouds were rolling across the sun, Molly’s expression changed dramatically, the smile disappearing from her face, a hand going up to clasp her chest. “Oh,” she gasped quietly.

“Molly?” Sherlock's eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Molly, what's happened?”

She didn't reply, her figure shimmering all over, like a mirage in a desert.

“Molly,” Sherlock said urgently. _She’s dead,_ his mind reminded him. _Surely nothing can truly hurt her now._

Still, a sense of foreboding filled Sherlock as he lay on the pavement, staring up at his ghost-friend.

“Too much,” she murmured, aghast. “Too much.”

“Oh, _no,_ ” Sherlock groaned despite himself. Had she pushed herself over the border so far that she was in danger of disappearing entirely?

“I...oh,” Molly clutched frantically at her chest. “ _Damn!”_

Sherlock practically jumped as Molly hissed the last word. He’d never heard her come anywhere close to swearing, and hearing it come out of her mouth startled him.

“Molly, what’s _wrong?_ ” he burst out.

“Too much,” the ghost said again, her face falling into despair. “I pushed myself too... _far…_ ” She hissed in agony, crumpling into herself, slowly growing transparent.

Pain erupted in Sherlock’s chest like he’d been shot.

Her rich brown eyes jerked to meet his as he half-propped himself up on an elbow, feeling the damp pavement through his trousers. They were achingly _beautiful_ in that moment of agony.

Sherlock was losing one of his friends.

Forever, truly forever.

“Molly, no,” he choked. “Don’t...don’t leave me. _Please_ don’t leave me.”

“I...will not leave,” Molly swore solemnly, a ghostly tear slipping down her delicate face. A slowly-disappearing hand clutched feebly at her chest, as if she was losing the power to go on. “Sherlock.”

Sherlock sharply inhaled.

Molly had _never, ever_ said his actual name in all the time he’d known her. She’d always called him _Holmes._ Sherlock had no idea what his name would sound like in Molly’s tone, but at last, at last he knew.

“Sherlock,” she said again, more hushed, weaker. “I will _never_ leave you. I will always be with you, whether you know it or not.”

She stopped growing transparent.

Sherlock watched her look down in shock at her hands, which were slowly growing brighter and brighter, evaporating at the fingertips in wisps of pure light.

Sherlock felt a tear slip down his cheek as their eyes met.

“Do not mourn, Sherlock Holmes.” she said bravely, chin wobbling. “Please. I am dead already. My time has long passed, I have been in your company on borrowed time.”

Her face began to grow brighter, brighter, Sherlock couldn’t _look anymore…_

 _Keep the lab for me, will you?_ Molly’s voice sounded fearful in his head, as if afraid of what she’d face when she left the final clutches of the Earth she’d never been able to really discover.

“Yes,” he whispered hoarsely, feeling his elbow give way.

He lay on his back on the pavement, feeling despair override all his senses, entering every room in his Mind Palace. The locks on all the doors he’d worked so hard to keep barred were corroding, falling away, despair was shouldering the doors open, slamming them open, laughing in triumph at his fall.

 _Open your eyes!_ Molly commanded.

Almost as if waking from sleep, Sherlock managed to wrench his eyes open.

Molly was still hovering over him, her head bent. Sherlock couldn’t see her face, but she jerked her head to look at the sky, every part of her blazing with light.

And suddenly, she burned.

Sherlock knew he would never have the chance to see a ghost disappear.

Or to see Molly, for that matter.

So he watched.

He watched her burn.

Molly gasped audibly and vanished in a burst of pure light.

And Sherlock was left alone, lying on the pavement, as time sped up and the rain began to fall.

Members of the Homeless Network swarmed out from practically nowhere and poured hastily procured window cleaner over his head and shoulders.

Sherlock stared at the sky, to the spot where Marie Eleanor Hooper had disappeared for good.

Silent tears mixed with the crimson of the window cleaner.

A few days later, before he was to be transported to the first step to destroying Moriarty’s network once and for all, he sneaked into Bart’s and set his course towards his old lab.

He quietly opened the door.

The whole place seemed _dead_ in a way. A layer of dust covered the shelves.

Sherlock went to the central table and leapt onto it, crossing his legs and steepling his fingers to stare at the picture frame on the microscope shelf.

An eternally-young Molly Hooper gazed solemnly out of the glass.

Sherlock sighed heavily and turned his gaze to his shoes before making a decision.

Straightening out his long legs, he swung off the table and picked up the frame.

Brushing off the layer of dust on the frame, he opened the old inner pocket of his coat and slipped the frame inside, close to his heart.

One last look around the room where he’d met one of his first friends.

And then he left, sweeping out of the lab without a sound.

He never looked back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, I post the last part. See you on the flip side...of the last installment of this story. _Ciao._

**_31 October 2012_ **

Strangely, it was quiet uptown on this late night.

The Bart’s morgue was cold and silent, much like the bodies stored away in its freezer.

The pathologist on duty had gone to the loo, leaving the cadaver he was working on laid out on his slab.

A light flickered momentarily in the corner of the morgue, wavering and weak at first, but growing steadily stronger until a shadowy figure appeared underneath it.

Molly Hooper blinked open her eyes and looked down at her hands, barely visible against the tiled morgue floor. She’d been trying to assume a temporary form for weeks, months even after Sherlock left Bart’s hospital for the last time, her photograph in his pocket. She’d seen him tuck the frame into his coat.

Strangely, she noted that it was tucked close to his heart.

And with that, she resolved to appear as a real, tangible figure once more.

And she’d pined after the only friend she’d had in over a century.

Molly missed her Holmes, his floppy curls and how they’d flap about wildly as he dashed around the lab like the epitome of the modern stereotype of a mad scientist. She missed his hypnotizingly light eyes, eyes she’d never seen the like of, how they’d gleam in the lights of the lab as he discovered something new about a piece of evidence. The trust in his eyes as he reached out to her, that Christmas Eve when she showed him how she’d died.

Molly missed her friend.

And missing...it really hurt.

She’d never experienced that kind of _missing_ in a long, long time...in fact, she hadn’t missed someone quite this much since her father died. This kind of missing, this _brand_ of missing was different, though. Molly couldn’t totally place a name by it other than _lovesickness._ Although she wasn’t sure whether this sort of feeling could be equated to a word of such connotation.

Underneath the fluorescent light, Molly sighed silently and looked up. She remembered the day she’d overstepped the boundaries between living and dead and caught Sherlock Holmes.

She’d been inside the morgue that day. Molly liked to linger there often. She’d been a pathologist in life, and as it would seem, in death as well. Whenever she was in the morgue, she felt a strange sort of familiarity, a feeling that even though the technology and the instruments modern pathologists used were advanced for the training she’d had, the morgue and its slabs was where she belonged.

Over the years, she’d gotten accustomed to the new methods and technology that the pathologists and morgue workers used. She watched, invisible and silent, as post-mortems were conducted, and sometimes Sherlock would come in with that strange, rather short blond-haired man, John, who had a peculiarly long nose and bore a strong resemblance to the hedgehog in Molly’s father’s _Book of Intriguing Creatures._ Sometimes he’d come in with a rather handsome, silver-haired man who called himself _Detective Inspector Lestrade._ The Detective Inspectors that had come into her morgue when she’d lived were honestly quite awkward to work with.

Sometimes, they’d inadvertently belittle her, skip over evidence of the greatest import when they believed that she had too delicate of a disposition to be able to see the evidence. Until that day in 1895, fresh out of training, when she’d physically forced a DI to show her the body, almost disappointed to find that the body in question had merely sustained several stab wounds to the lower abdomen and a cut throat. Apparently, he’d judged that textbook-example stab wounds were too gory for her eyes. She’d seen worse, to say the least...seen bodies that made the male students around her vomit into gutters and faint like the stereotypes of women that society upheld.

The day Sherlock plunged off the roof, she was in the morgue, immersed in such memories of her past. Meeting Sherlock had certainly helped her to come to terms with her death and her past as a woman, just trying to make her way in a man’s world.

She was invisible then, just in case anybody barged inside the room, and standing by the window, gazing at the modern London outside.

She was longing to go out, to venture the streets she used to wander on her days off. Sometimes, she would dress up as a gentleman, paste on her mustache and sideburns, pull on the wig she wore when she went out for work-related issues. She would stand at her cracked mirror and run her long fingers through the fibers of the wig. Molly had to admit that she _did_ like the wig and sideburns. The mustache got in her way when she talked at length, but she enjoyed wearing the wig, sideburns, and...oh, yes, her coat. She loved her coat, a charcoal number that, although heavy, was indispensable to keep out the rain.

Sometimes, when she put on her whole ensemble, she felt more...she felt more _normal_ in the clothes and appearance of a man than when she paraded the streets as Molly, a veil over her face to stave away the stench with a parasol tucked in her arm. No, when she went to walk the streets of Victorian London, she was Milo. Milo Alexander Hooper, afraid of nothing and no one. Milo with the jade-topped cane and oddly shiny shoes, the tie cinched a bit tight around a slender neck, in-style bowler pulled low over the brow. When she was Milo, she felt practically unstoppable, tipping a nod to the parasol-carrying ladies passing by, ordering a drink at a lounge in Milo’s tenor.

As she stood at the window the day Sherlock went away, she wondered just how much London had changed since her death. In the distance, she could see modern, sleek buildings dotting the skyline...what were they called? Oh yes, _skyscrapers._ Or whatever they called those buildings now.

She turned her gaze below. Where carriages and horses had once rattled along the road, shining metal contraptions raced back and forth, faster than any train or carriage in Molly’s lifetime. They were _cars,_ yes, although very different from the first cars she’d ever seen, those machines that looked starkly awkward now compared to the modern vehicles, their exteriors polished and smooth.

But something was different that day. A black car pulled up, and a rather short man got out and walked towards the building. Molly squinted. _Is that John?_

He kept walking until he got covered up by the ambulance station.

She’d shaken it off then, turned her gaze back up and looking towards the gray sky. _Looks like rain,_ she said silently to herself. She missed rain. She hadn’t felt rain in centuries. Watching the rain had been one of her pastimes ever since she was a girl, and that habit hadn’t died when Molly had.

She expected to see raindrops falling from the sky. Maybe it would be a torrent, maybe it would be just light. She hoped secretly that it would be a lot of rain. She’d missed the last heavy rainfall and was hoping to see some that day to make up for it.

Molly didn’t expect to see Sherlock Holmes fall out of the sky, not too far above the morgue window.

Time seemed to slow down.

She turned visible in surprise and stared. What was Sherlock doing, falling off the roof? Suddenly, fear gripped her. He was trying to _kill_ himself.

Molly was torn. What to do?

The pavement leered up at her as she gripped the windowsill with her ghostly hands and peered down.

And then, she made a decision.

Silently, she gathered her strength. _Think, Molly. Think!_ She called up all the memories she had of Sherlock: when they’d first met, her discovery of his letter, him showing her an experiment in the lab, poring over evidence together, Sherlock trying to show her to his flatmate, Sherlock examining a body while she watched, invisible to all but him, that moment when she’d rushed at him out of pure happiness, seeing her picture on the microscope shelf every day, that moment when she’d showed him that which she hadn’t shown anyone before: her death…

She looked down at her hands then, watching in pure intrigue as they grew clearer and clearer, brighter and brighter. In truth, it was the most corporal she’d ever been since before her death.

Finally, she knew she couldn’t waste any time marveling at her form if she had to save her friend. She gathered up all the strength from her memories of her friend, made herself invisible, and quickly passed through the window, making for the ground.

She dived down towards the pavement, racing Sherlock. Thankfully, being a ghost, she was much faster at falling than Sherlock and arrived to a stop on the pavement seconds before he did.

Quickly, she made herself visible and stretched out her arms just as Sherlock hurtled down into them, an arm thrown to one side.

The impact of his body being caught in her arms was extreme: Molly had to close her eyes and call up more memories from her long, _long_ timeline just to keep a form. Her head pounded. She hadn’t felt actual pain in centuries, and the shock of it jarred her. But she kept a stiff upper lip, staggered to keep her friend in her arms, and safely lowered him to the pavement, her nose brushing against his softly curling hair…

Molly shook herself out of her memories weakly, and the fluorescent light shuddered. It was harder to get out of the past these days...it felt like the past was trying to claim her, to devour her, to snatch her back into its gaping maw.

And Molly wanted none of that.

She needed to claim a body. And fast.

Molly forced herself to cross the room to the freezers. Each foot she traveled was a struggle in and of itself, and once she got to the freezers, she hovered by, figure beginning to shimmer wildly, and wondered how she’d even gotten to the area at all.

A faint memory of racing her cousin to the tree on their grandparent’s estate as a four-year-old threatened to swallow her up. That day, she’d tripped over a tree root and torn her least favorite dress, but not before receiving several painful scratches over her arms and a rather unpleasant cramp in her side.

Molly pulled herself out of the memories with a cold shudder. It was getting harder and harder to pull out of her past by the _second._ Times were more desperate than she’d first thought.

Twitching convulsively, she managed to force the fourth storage door from the left open, and even though the door wasn’t all the way open, she curled her transparent fingers around the edge of the tray and heaved.

She managed to slide the tray out as quietly as she could, gritting her teeth as she tugged.

Molly didn’t even care about the head pathologist noticing anything off: she knew the staff well enough to know that this pathologist went to the loo, taking his...what were they called? his _mobile_ with him, playing his little games with it that were so loud that she could hear him playing through the bathroom door. Inadequate. If he’d been working under her, Molly would have fired him in an instant.

Molly began to slowly remember an instance in the former morgue, 115 years to the day, when she’d yelled at poor Finch, the morgue worker who didn’t know how to properly clean up after himself. She’d seen him actually turn away and weep when he found out his superior had gotten herself killed.

Hissing quietly, she forced herself to _focus._ It was 2012, not 1897. Molly felt a strange sort of horror as she realized that some of her memories were slipping away. Was Sherlock’s scarf dark green with black stripes, or was it blue? Yellow or gray? Her eyes widened in terror and she pulled harder, making the tray slide completely out until the body under the sheet was fully out of the storage.

Molly flicked a finger, and the sheet covering the body slid off and fell to the floor. She didn’t even so much as blink as she gazed down on the body she’d been watching. A certain Ellen Kitts had been brought in, evidently killed of food poisoning. _Fairly small, reddish-brown hair, smattering of freckles._ Molly felt quite sorry for the woman, but through her plans, she hoped that she could give Ellen’s body a second chance.

_A second chance…_

Molly herself was in need of one, too.

Of course, there was always the option to just _let go,_ to let her memories, to let whatever she had once been free to the winds. But Molly didn’t want any of it. She always had felt like she really hadn’t had the chance to have a _life._ She hadn’t had the chances that practically everyone was able to have, the chance to go through life fully, the chance to enjoy the happiness and sorrow of everyday existence.

For 115 years Molly had watched people go through their own lives. She watched as children were born in the delivery rooms, and watched whole families grieve as their loved ones were laid out on morgue slabs, across the generations. She’d seen pathologists conduct multiple autopsies and watched as each tool was put to its use.

But it all seemed like it was through a glass wall, like the scenes of life that played out in front of Molly’s vision were held just out of her reach, never for her to touch, never for her to experience, never to behold. She watched new friendships blossom, and watched people separate, sometimes amicably, other times with strife.

She never anticipated that anything of the sort could happen to her.

And then Sherlock Holmes came and blew that all away.

Molly realized that part of her motive was all Sherlock, in a way. She hadn’t forgotten what she’d promised to him, that she’d always be with him, wherever he went, even though she was a ghost who could not (for all intents and purposes) venture beyond the boundaries of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.

She wanted life.

No, more than that. She wanted _Sherlock_.

Desperate times called for desperate measures, and if this didn’t count as desperate- Molly wasn’t sure what did, then.

Molly closed her eyes and slowly glided backwards from the tray until she was about ten feet from Ellen Kitts’ body.

Opening her eyes, she eyed the tray.

“This is for him,” she said quietly. “For Sherlock Holmes.”

And with that, she screwed her eyes shut, called up every single memory from her long timeline that hadn’t yet slipped away, and slammed forwards into the body.

* * *

 

**_2014_ **

_Click, click, click, click, click._

The soles of Sherlock’s shoes clicked on the tile floor of the hallway as he strode purposefully through the darkened corridor, directing his steps towards his old lab.

He couldn’t help but feel extreme disappointment and sadness curdling into anger in his chest. He’d gone to the restaurant Mycroft had told him about, went to see his old friend John, tried to make amends, only to break into his _former_ flatmate’s proposal to his girlfriend. Sherlock felt like an immense failure, a total wreck, a _clot_ with wounds on his back from a crowbar in Serbia. He thought his friend would at least welcome him. He would have taken a polite welcome, even if it was stoic or cold… that at least he could depend on from John.

 _Friend?_ Bah. Surely he was no longer in John’s good books, seeing as John Watson had slammed him to the floor of the posh restaurant, his blonde girlfriend (and the patrons of the restaurant) watching in horror from above the two men.

He popped his collar up further and burst loudly into his old lab. It seemed like nobody had gone in since he’d jumped off the roof of the hospital, and everything was coated in a layer of dust. He strode to the place where he knew his riding crop was stashed and shoved it into his coat before slamming out again, the sense of anger blooming painfully throughout his chest. He could bully that pathologist into letting him at a body; if Sherlock remembered correctly he was a boring, lazy sort of man who played that Candy Crush game on his mobile whenever he lurked in the loo.

 _Pathologist._ He stopped in the middle of the hallway as the thought of Molly swirled in his Mind Palace. Subconsciously, his hand went up to where his heart was, towards the inner pocket of his coat. The frame that had once lay heavy across his chest had been taken out every night, wherever Sherlock was sleeping, to be placed at eye level until he dropped off to sleep. He’d placed it on a hotel nightstand in a little hotel that faced a busy Front Street in an equally little historical section of a California town that looked like a scene out of the old Wild West movies. He’d placed the frame on a not-so-clean card table set up by a flimsy cot, propped it up in the backseat pocket of an abandoned cab somewhere in Eastern Europe, gently placed it upright on the floor by a futon in a little apartment in the Philippines.

During an altercation with a rather unsavory fellow (he didn’t remember exactly where), the frame fell out of his coat and shattered on the concrete. His sparring opponent had, unfortunately, caught a glimpse of the face and had began taunting Sherlock with more fervor than before, at least until Sherlock had aimed a right hook squarely in his face and knocked him unconscious. Even then, he didn’t stop pummeling him until Irene (one of his collaborators during those two years), forcefully yanked him off of the man. Sherlock had pocketed the frame, later tossing it into an American dumpster in some suburb and keeping the picture tucked into his pocketbook, specifically for the mission.

Unfortunately, he’d lost that pocketbook too, in Serbia or probably before that. It wasn’t so much the documents that he had been angry about missing: after all, practically all of them were false. He’d been angry about losing Molly’s picture, the last piece he’d had of that friendship that saved him in the end.

He strode angrily up the stairs, down another hallway, took a few blind turns, and ended up in a waiting room. Cursing loudly, he made an about-face and swung out towards the hallway, towards the lab, anger burning furiously in his chest, so furiously he felt like he was going to explode from it all…

_Wham!_

He slammed into somebody, a squeak coming from them, and they tumbled to the tile floor, a mess of coats and legs and arms and long hair. _Damnit, I’ve crashed into a woman,_ Sherlock muttered inwardly. _Then she’ll recognize me… Damnit, Sherlock, why did you come here?_

His riding crop skittered across the floor, out of his coat, and his back hit the tile floor. He almost whimpered from the pain as his barely-healed wounds connected with the solid floor, and sat up as quickly as possible to spare himself any more pain. Scrambling to his feet, he scrabbled after his riding crop, trying to snatch it up and run away before the woman he’d crashed into had gotten a glimpse of his face.

As he snatched it up and shoved it back into his coat, he tripped over a neat ankle-boot and staggered to the opposite wall of the passageway, grasping onto it for support.

“Bloody _hell,_ ” he muttered before raising his eyes from the ankle-boot.

The woman sat up and stared at him with brown eyes that he hadn’t seen in two whole years of running.

And Sherlock’s heart practically stopped.

“S-Sherlock?”

“ _Molly?!”_

“Oh...oh my God,” she murmured, struggling to raise herself to her feet and failing spectacularly. Sherlock practically rushed over to her side, dropping to his knees, ignoring the clatter as his riding crop fell out of his coat again.

“Molly,” he said numbly. “Molly, what the _hell…_ ” He gathered himself to keep himself from merely stuttering out swears. “The last time I saw you, you were a ghost,” he said disbelievingly. “You were _dead._ You burned away in front of _me._ ” He realized suddenly that in that moment, the tables had been turned. Where he had surprised and shocked John with his return, Molly was now shocking _him…_

Almost instinctively, he raised a trembling hand and cautiously touched her face, as if it would melt away at his touch. But it stayed...she was warm, soft, and definitely alive. His hand drifted farther, down her face, against the side of her neck. She inhaled sharply, eyes widening as her mouth slightly parted.

“How?” he asked her. “How did you…”

“ _I claimed a body,_ ” she breathed out, one of her slender hands coming up to grip his wrist, whose hand was still hovering by where her neck joined with her shoulder, almost brushing against the knit fabric of her pale yellow sweater. She swallowed, and smiled up at him. “I did it all myself,” she said, modest pride filling her face. “I tried to assume a temporary form before picking out a body from the morgue.” With her other hand, she gestured towards the rooms from which she’d came, adjusting her bag as it lay dejectedly on the tile. Sherlock picked it up for her and tucked it beside her leg. “And I...I claimed it,” she said. “I’m not sure exactly _how_ it happened, but I just...I just slammed myself into the body and...and I woke up in my old flat from when I was alive, but modernized. It was all so _strange,_ Sherlock,” she said softly. “But I got used to it and they accepted me here. I even had a modern degree. I don’t know what sort of supernatural laws govern that sort of thing, but it’s like I was always here.”

“Why did you do it?” Sherlock asked her quietly, echoing John’s words from earlier that night. “You could have chosen to slip away peacefully, to be free from this place.”

“But I _didn’t,_ ” Molly’s eyes sparkled. “I _didn’t._ I really didn’t want to do that. Since I’ve died, I’ve been so unsatisfied. I wanted to be able to _live,_ I wanted a second chance. I wanted to be able to breathe, to love, to...just to have everything that came with life.” She looked down for a second, as if tentative to share the last bit of her little monologue with him.

“And Sherlock, I wanted _you,_ ” she confessed quietly, her brown eyes staring up into his with nothing but trust. “I wanted you and your experiments, your crimes that you’d bring to solve with me, the way you made me feel like I _mattered,_ like I _counted._ I wanted you, and everything that came with you. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, or where you’ve been since I was still a ghost, but I always held out hope that you’d come back. And you _have,_ Sherlock, you _have,_ and I feel so much happier because of it.”

Sherlock’s eyes widened and he sat back on his heels, staring at Molly in shock. He still couldn’t believe that he was seeing her now, alive. In all honesty, he couldn’t quite believe that he was able to survive all of his trials.

_I always held out hope._

Sherlock thought back. Molly had told him that she’d always be with him, and now she’d told him that she’d always held out hope for him.

Was that how he had been able to carry on? _Hope?_

He stared at Molly for a while longer.

He’d experienced rejection (three, to be exact) already that evening. Could he be experiencing… _acceptance_ now?

He remembered that day in the lab, what seemed like a lifetime ago. It flitted into the forefront of his Mind Palace. A bold, charming ghost. An equally bold note on the table. And the next day, a dainty reply, and the friendship that blossomed from that point...

Suddenly, Sherlock came to a decision.

Sherlock vaulted to his feet, stretching out his aching back.

“Sherlock?” Molly asked uncertainly from his feet.

Sherlock bent over and offered Molly a hand. “Here.”

She accepted it and he helped her up, picking up her bag for her as she straightened herself out. Sherlock handed her bag back to her silently and stepped away, putting his hands behind his back.

“Hello,” he said uncertainly. “I’m Sherlock Holmes. You’re Molly Hooper, right? Are you a pathologist here, by any chance?”

Molly’s eyes gleamed as she caught on. “Yes, indeed I am,” she slipped in easily, a little smirk crossing her face. “I’m a pathologist here, and I’ve just gotten off my shift.”

“Well, Molly,” Sherlock said a bit playfully. His voice sounded different to his ears: much happier, filled with more… _hope._

_I always held out hope._

“I know a fairly decent restaurant whose owner would be pleased to accommodate our service, even at this hour,” he said carefully. “It’s Italian. Would you like to... accompany me?”

“Certainly, Sherlock,” Molly said jauntily.

“Wonderful,” Sherlock bantered back and cautiously slipped his hand into hers _(dainty, small, warm, and most importantly- alive)_. The end of her rich brown ponytail swished over her shoulder as she looked up to him. He looked down at her, a smile crossing his face.

_Hope._

“What do we stall for?” Molly asked him, an echo of that moment so long ago in the morgue.

Sherlock decided a second thing, and bent to kiss her gently on the forehead. He felt her start in surprise, and he felt a rush of contentment course through him, washing away all the anger of earlier.

 _I always held out_ hope _._

And Sherlock and Molly, these two people that fate had granted second chances, walked hand-in-hand towards the stairwell, together.

Behind them, under the fluorescent light at the end of the hallway, a barely-visible shadow stood, hands folded neatly over a flowing dress.

She smiled as she stared after them, knowing that they were happy together at last.

 _I am satisfied_ , she whispered.

And with that, the last fragment of Molly Hooper’s ghost dissipated, melting into wisps and disappearing- forever.

* * *

_**END**  
_


End file.
